Nick Wilson of Performancing quoted Google’s spam warrior Matt Cutts in October 2005 from the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. The statement couldn’t ring truer still today.

“There’s a ton of room left for experimentation,” he said. “If someone comes up with something better than AdSense and kills it, the world will be a better place.”

There is nothing happening on the Web today that provides publishers, advertisers and users with a relevant, targeted platform to interact and easily communicate with each other (other than blog networks, tools and tagging networks like Del.icio.us of course ;)). Wandering shopping malls hoping to find what you’re looking for is fast becoming a fun “pre-web” activity, and has not been the primary way consumers shop for quite some time. “Going out” or having “face-to-face meetings” has also not been the only way people communicate or collaborate for years.

Today we look for what we want and we can’t stand clutter. If we want information we don’t want to see products, and we’d rather hear someone we respect recommend a product rather than be bombarded by overly-aggressive ads. If we want a product we’ll either go looking for it, to learn about or buy it – or we’ll go to favorite blogger on the topic and see if he has anything to say about it. Even Time magazine gets it with the person of year for 2006 being “YOU” – the personalized information retrieval and boundary-less instantaneous-and-ongoing-conversation era.

So advertisers want to join the conversations. People talk about products, services, businesses, people, places, things… and they’ll do it if you pay them and they’ll do it if you won’t. Good people will always talk honestly – its integrity and its nothing new – and good people will let their audience know if they are being paid to talk.

We are getting closer to an time not of *information cluttered with ads* but *information we can trust* (because people like us will create and spread it).